Does it seem to you like I need both A and B drives connected for WinMFS to expand the A drive properly?

I want to retain all my shows and settings, otherwise I'd just divorce the B drive, do a truncated backup of A, and dump a 2 TB drive in there .

Click to expand...

Usually we just transfer the shows to the PC then divorce the external, then do the backup/restore to new drive and transfer the shows back to the Tivo. But it cannot be done with protected recordings.

Usually we just transfer the shows to the PC then divorce the external, then do the backup/restore to new drive and transfer the shows back to the Tivo. But it cannot be done with protected recordings.

Click to expand...

Yep, if I could do that, I would transfer them all to another S3 I have (much faster than to the PC), but I would lose about half my shows due to the stupid copy flag.

On an editorial note, it would be ridiculously simple for TiVo to implement a "move" function for those programs with the flag set, so that in the end only one copy still existed on the destination machine. This would honor the "do not copy" edict. I've suggested this to them in ten different ways over the last few years, and have been totally ignored. They are less end user concerned with each passing day.

As with social media sites, we are not the customers; we are the product TiVo sells to their customers, the advertisers.

Once I have a set of working clones, I'm going to try restoring the A image to a larger drive and see if I can expand it.

Does it seem to you like I need both A and B drives connected for WinMFS to expand the A drive properly?

Or should I try it with just the A drive connected?

In the past, when I had only the A drive hooked up, WinMFS complained that I only had the A drive hooked up (knows there's a B drive somewhere).

I want to retain all my shows and settings, otherwise I'd just divorce the B drive, do a truncated backup of A, and dump a 2 TB drive in there .

Click to expand...

That's the rub that might prevent it from working. Both drives need to be connected since WinMFS has to be aware of the current setup when it does the expansion. I am afraid that if only drive A is connected it might erase references to drive B when it expands.

If you want to try my 2 to 1 idea PM me and will help you work through the details. Sounds harder than it is. Mostly time consuming with the copy process. No guarantees. Might be just a waste of time.

AFAIK the 2-1 function in WinMFS only works on S1 TiVos. DvrBARS can dupe any drive in the Full mode, and should work in Modified Full or Truncated mode as long as both drives are present during the backup stage.

Combining drives should be easy once I add MFS partition relocation / resizing, but that code is many months away. I think I know HOW to do it, but in programming terms I'm looking at the tip of Everest and haven't even made it to base camp or met the sherpas yet.

I hope this doesn't come across in the wrong way. I'm just trying to help the cause of the thread, by providing a source for some 2TB drives:

I just received a shipment of six WD20EADS-00S2B0 HARCHV2AA 2TB Western Digital hard drives, as replacements for some degraded/defective ones I sent back.

I'm curious how the drives have the same model number as the Caviar Green drives I sent back, but, instead have a black/white label, with no mention of Green, or Caviar (although the power & 32MB cache specs are the same), and the label doesn't specify the LBA of the drives (which I expect from AF drives, but EADS drives never were)...

To the point: I really don't need these drives for anything, since before I RMA'd the originals, I bought a case of WD20EURS drives to use for my TiVos, with a couple extra to shelf as spares.

Anyway, I have six 2TB WD20EADS drives (and more to come), which are still factory sealed, and this seemed like an appropriate place to say I'd be willing to part with them for a fair price, either to help the project, or help those looking to expand their capacity.

PM me with any reasonable offer(s). If I'm out of line, I'll retract this post.

It would be thoughtful if he pulled the text from his site which specifically states it will work on S3 boxes. I wasted a lot of time with that and MFSLive trying to make that work.

Click to expand...

If you have a Dropbox account and enough space, put the full backups of both drives in a shared folder and send me an invite (same user name). I may be able to figure out something, and it would be a good way to get me back into the programming mode. Right now I'm in "watch TV & drink beer" mode.

I don't know that WinMFS can't do it from first hand experience, but someone else said that it couldn't in a recent thread and your experience seems to confirm it. It may even have worked until 11.0k was released with support for 2TB drives.

I recently got a new XL4 and ran a backup on the 2TB drive, before ever booting it up (creating a pristine image). I ran a full backup and after 6 hours of running, it created a small 1.6 GB backup file. Does this sound about right?

Silly me, I thought I would be playing with my new toy much sooner than that!

The one thing that surprised me was that the backup needs to be written to a formatted Windows drive. Makes sense now, but I was used to the dd type of copies and just assumed the same. Luckily, I had an online drive with enough space, in addition to the unformatted drive I was originally planning to copy to.

Also, when starting the utility, I do get an error message stating that the Drive A: is not ready. I don't have an A: drive. I simply said Continue and had no issues. It was easy to run. Thanks!

The 6 hours and 1.6gb backup for a full backup sounds correct. It reads every byte on the drive so it takes longer. dd in Linux would give you about the same time if you tried to copy the drive. Truncated backups are very quick as it reads only portions of the drive that are necessary. Usually in matter of minutes it will be completed. Modified will take longer as it depends on how many recordings you have. For a pristine drive, all three should be roughly the same size.
As far as the error message, ggieseke will have to comment on that.

I recently got a new XL4 and ran a backup on the 2TB drive, before ever booting it up (creating a pristine image). I ran a full backup and after 6 hours of running, it created a small 1.6 GB backup file. Does this sound about right?

Silly me, I thought I would be playing with my new toy much sooner than that!

The one thing that surprised me was that the backup needs to be written to a formatted Windows drive. Makes sense now, but I was used to the dd type of copies and just assumed the same. Luckily, I had an online drive with enough space, in addition to the unformatted drive I was originally planning to copy to.

Also, when starting the utility, I do get an error message stating that the Drive A: is not ready. I don't have an A: drive. I simply said Continue and had no issues. It was easy to run. Thanks!

Click to expand...

6 hours sounds about right for a 2TB drive in Full mode, and about 1.6GB is the same as my XL4 image. Full backups read every byte on the drive and count on there being lots of 2MB chunks of all zeros for compression.

A Modified Full or Truncated backup of a factory drive should give the same results in a few minutes.

Not sure about the A: drive message, maybe it's something in your BIOS settings or an SD card reader. I've patched around most of the unusual drive configurations that it has encountered so far, but I still like to pop up error messages so that I know something is odd. As long as it continues and doesn't kill the main program that's how it should work.

If you have a Dropbox account and enough space, put the full backups of both drives in a shared folder and send me an invite (same user name). I may be able to figure out something, and it would be a good way to get me back into the programming mode. Right now I'm in "watch TV & drink beer" mode.

I don't know that WinMFS can't do it from first hand experience, but someone else said that it couldn't in a recent thread and your experience seems to confirm it. It may even have worked until 11.0k was released with support for 2TB drives.

Click to expand...

The files at 1TB and 250G are too big for me to upload with the limited upload pipe I have, I'm afraid. It would take me over a week to upload just the 1 TB one. But I have started to work with jmbach, and he may have an idea on how to combine two drives into one on an S3.

For those unaware, the program will flag bad sectors/data as it reads, but thankfully does not abort.

What does happen, however, is that an error window pops up and needs to be acknowledged before the the backup continues, which means someone has to keep an eye on things while the backup is running, or it will wait forever if there's an error.

Perhaps the next version could have an option to just continue on errors, and maybe generate an error log text file on the destination device for fully unattended long operation.

For those unaware, the program will flag bad sectors/data as it reads, but thankfully does not abort.

What does happen, however, is that an error window pops up and needs to be acknowledged before the the backup continues, which means someone has to keep an eye on things while the backup is running, or it will wait forever if there's an error.

Perhaps the next version could have an option to just continue on errors, and maybe generate an error log text file on the destination device for fully unattended long operation.

Click to expand...

It used to abort on errors during backup, so that's a small improvement.

I'll probably add something like that to the next version, along with a subroutine to break down the 2MB blocks it uses now into 512 byte sector reads in case of errors. The initial goal was just to get it working at all with healthy drives.

It used to abort on errors during backup, so that's a small improvement.

I'll probably add something like that to the next version, along with a subroutine to break down the 2MB blocks it uses now into 512 byte sector reads in case of errors. The initial goal was just to get it working at all with healthy drives.

Click to expand...

Don't mistake me - I am VERY grateful for the program, and having to manually continue on errors is a small price to pay. I just wanted to make people aware that if they're doing a long operation, they should look in on it time to time just in case.

This is the only program I was able to find running in Windows that can duplicate a TiVo drive byte for byte, and the fact it continues after an error is fantastic. It allowed me to refresh the six year old drives in my S3 that were starting to have issues.

It used to abort on errors during backup, so that's a small improvement.

I'll probably add something like that to the next version, along with a subroutine to break down the 2MB blocks it uses now into 512 byte sector reads in case of errors. The initial goal was just to get it working at all with healthy drives.

I didn't take your other post as criticism at all. Keep the suggestions coming. I suffer from "can't see the forest for the trees" more than most programmers and it took a LOT of input from jmbach, retiredqwest and others to get it this far.

I hope this doesn't come across in the wrong way. I'm just trying to help the cause of the thread, by providing a source for some 2TB drives:

I just received a shipment of six WD20EADS-00S2B0 HARCHV2AA 2TB Western Digital hard drives, as replacements for some degraded/defective ones I sent back.

I'm curious how the drives have the same model number as the Caviar Green drives I sent back, but, instead have a black/white label, with no mention of Green, or Caviar (although the power & 32MB cache specs are the same), and the label doesn't specify the LBA of the drives (which I expect from AF drives, but EADS drives never were)...

To the point: I really don't need these drives for anything, since before I RMA'd the originals, I bought a case of WD20EURS drives to use for my TiVos, with a couple extra to shelf as spares.

Anyway, I have six 2TB WD20EADS drives (and more to come), which are still factory sealed, and this seemed like an appropriate place to say I'd be willing to part with them for a fair price, either to help the project, or help those looking to expand their capacity.

PM me with any reasonable offer(s). If I'm out of line, I'll retract this post.[

I cant PM because I don't have 10 posts but I am interested in a drive or 2 if the price is right Can I email you?

This program sounds like just what I need to restore a TiVo Premiere Elite XL4 TCD758250 that I just got which has a Parental Control password that I need to clear. TiVo support has been unable to reset it, but I think the problem is that it is not configured for the internet and of course I can change the settings without the Parental Control password.

Does anyone have the small backup from DvrBARS for this TiVo that I could download? Or is there any other way to do this without having a good drive?

I just received a shipment of six WD20EADS-00S2B0 HARCHV2AA 2TB Western Digital hard drives, as replacements for some degraded/defective ones I sent back (and more to come), which are still factory sealed, and I'd be willing to part with them for a fair price, either to help the project, or help those looking to expand their capacity. PM me with any reasonable offer(s).

Click to expand...

I cant PM because I don't have 10 posts but I am interested in a drive or 2 if the price is right Can I email you?

This program sounds like just what I need to restore a TiVo Premiere Elite XL4 TCD758250 that I just got which has a Parental Control password that I need to clear. TiVo support has been unable to reset it, but I think the problem is that it is not configured for the internet and of course I can change the settings without the Parental Control password.

Does anyone have the small backup from DvrBARS for this TiVo that I could download? Or is there any other way to do this without having a good drive?

Any help would be great!

Thanks,
Rich

Click to expand...

I will send you a PM link to the image, but if you use it on your existing drive it will basically wipe out everything on it. If you're willing to go that far I would also recommend using the Full Restore option so that it wipes every sector that isn't being written with actual data. It will take a LOT longer, but probably worth it in this case.

It's an interesting question. I will play around with parental controls on my XL this weekend and see if I can figure out where it's located. I need to look at 20.3.1 anyway, and if it's an easy fix I can add another option to the program to just wipe the password. If you can hold off a few more days don't do anything drastic yet.

Edit: Forget the Full Restore stuff. It slipped my feeble minf that you would have to do a full C&DE anyway with an image from another TiVo.